I was thinking “€50 is a no, €25 is a maybe, €20 is a yes”, so I’ve gone and bought it.

I *just* swore off further sight-unseen Double Fine purchases (after adoring the shit out of Psychonauts and blindly buying Stacking, Iron Brigade, Costume Quest and The Cave and not particularly caring for any of them beyond the cute presentation) but I’ve wanted this one since it first came out, so here we go again.

Although I already own the game on PS3 – and do not care for it (in case anyone couldn’t tell from the above statement – I’m tempted to purchase the Steam version to give Double Fine more proof that PC gamers need love to.

“I’m tempted to purchase the Steam version to give Double Fine more proof that PC gamers need love to.”

I’m pretty sure Double Fine have gotten that message, given that most of their previously console-exclusive titles have made it over to PC. The only ones that haven’t are the Kinect games, which I have no interest in. Not to mention the fact that The Cave was released for PC simultaneously with the concole versions and Double Fine Adventure won’t be coming to consoles.

In other words, as much as I like to support the idea of previously console-exclusive games making their way to PC, I’d recommend only buying the game if you’re actually interested in playing it. Not as some form of charity in an effort to send a message already sent and received.

It is drenched in Metal, breathes Metal, lives Metal. They took every Metal Album Cover ever and made it into one big world you can cruise around in. It’s full of familiar faces, sights and voices. Every metal trope ever stuffed inside a game. For a metal head, this is one big giant memorylane trip into nostalgia paradise.

But it is very little beyond that. The gamey parts, especially the RTS Sections can be annoying as hell. Often made me go “yeah well, whatever game. I’ma cruise around and see if I can’t find some nice looking scenery, some new songs and stuff instead”. And you know what? I still bloody loved it.

I really wish they’d made a simpler, more focused game. I loved the whole setting, but a rather empty open world and the RTS segments really detracted from my overall enjoyment of it. I feel bad for criticising a developer for trying something different but I can’t help but feel that a dedicated action game with less expansive, more detailed levels would have made for a far better game.

It actually started as a pure MP-focused RTS game. The adventure elements were added due to the necessity of an SP game.

One thing people don’t realize is that it’s not meant to be played as a proper RTS. If you’re not in the middle of your attacking unit mob, you’re doing it wrong. There’s a reason they give several options for getting around the battlefield quickly.

Except you absolutely can, because that’s what the Double Teams are for. At no point in the game can you jump alone into the entire enemy army and expect to live; but use one of the teamup moves, and suddenly you’re not only invincible (any damage goes to the troop you’re teaming with instead of you) but you get to use the powerful combo move that’s stronger than anything either of you can do alone.

Yea, I’m mistaking the original score soundtrack (by Peter M.) with the licensed tracks. (Which is not bad itself)

But again, there was 107 tracks listed for the original game (I wrote the WIkipedia article for it so I know this is true), and the Steam store pitch is 108, so yea, I really don’t think we lost any songs.

Could be they’re just messing with us. If Valve want to keep Steam releases secret and they can’t stop people from mining new game names from the config files then the only other solution is to obscure them by padding the list out with fake options.

Ah, fantastic! So the rumours proved to be true. Wonder if they’ll be sprucing it up at all for the PC version (with hopefully improved controls for the strategic elements), or if they’ll just be throwing it out there as a direct port? Certainly took ‘em long enough, if the latter is the case.

Either way, very interesting. Will most likely nab it when it comes out.

If you used the flag, the battles controlled fine: this meant that your units would do the vast majority of their movement automatically, leaving you free to hop around the battlefield and put all your action abilities to use, picking off lone enemy infantry, teaming up with your own units when your army clashed with theirs, playing guitar solos at the right time, and so on.

The problem was that they didn’t emphasise the right way to play it, and there was enough scope with the flying around and unit commands and such, that in the absence of any explicit instruction, the intended way to play appeared to be to treat the battles as one-off RTS Lite gameplay segments, rather than as large-scale freestyle action battles. I fell into this trap too, by the way, but the fault is with the game’s tutorialisation rather than its mechanics.

“We’re actually working hard to make this version even better than the console, with all DLC included, and new rendering features like SSAO, high quality anti-aliasing, >30fps rendering, etc!”

“Oh, and we’ll release updates for Costume Quest and Stacking that remove the framerate cap there, too. Those will probably land a couple of weeks after BL’s official launch, mostly just depending on the bandwidth of our programming and QA teams.”

Yeah, I cannot imagine them even bothering to release it without all the licensed songs; it would be both completely antithetical to the entire heart and purpose of the game, and there are countless moments in the story intrinsically linked to specific licensed tracks (Mr. Crowley immediately springs to mind).

It would be awesome if the deluxe edition had alllll the licensed stuff in addition to the original score of course, but no doubt actually securing all those license rights for such a separate release would have been incredibly costly and time-consuming. THere are a LOT of licensed songs in there.

All Double Fine games I’ve played have had average gameplay, but were bailed out by superb settings, writing and presentation. I don’t expect this to be any different, and being a huge fan of the music in question, I’m going to enjoy experiencing this homage.

Great game. I remember beating it on Xbox 360 (before 2 systems died and I gave up on that console) and thoroughly enjoying the entire thing. It’s very varied. The RTS-like elements were fun IMO and the open world exploring I thought was really neat and appealing. The crazy monsters in the world, the “collectables” which varied by the most memorable was ball-gagged dragon/serpents. The landscape with all the giant rock-formation guitars and other Metal album-esque art in the world really was/is superb.

If you never got around to it, this is one game that didn’t get enough time to shine.

I’d like to remind everyone that this game like all recent Double Fine games will have the framerate locked to 30fps. This was baked into the Brutal Legend engine and thus cannot be fixed easily without substantially rewriting the engine. All subsequent Double Fine games have used this engine and thus they all exhibit this

Now I love Tim Schafer and I want all the best for all the great people at Double Fine but they have been promising to fix this since Costume Quest came out over a year ago, and have promised this fix for every game since. The fix has yet to come, and while they are promising this shortly after the game launches, I’ll believe it when I see it.

If you can live with that, great. But I’m not touching this game until the fix is actually out and proven to be more than just rendering the same frame twice.

I was gonna support the stance that, yes, it absolutely is a small issue particularly in a game where precision mouse/whatever aiming isn’t required. But maybe you’re being sarcastic? If not, yeah if you give a shit about your precious frames THAT much then you’re kind of being a whiny baby. I remember when getting 30fps was friggin’ AWESOME smooth (that shit’s better than TV!) and yeah it effects gameplay in something like this (or any of the other games DF has made actually) in no way so fuck it what a sad thing to be so upset about. Particularly when I can’t think of any games that EVER advertise “(x) amount of FPS!” as a feature, or indeed mention it mention it at all. (Maybe CoD peripherally but who cares about that shit)

Anyway yeah maybe the original poster shouldn’t say shit WILL be such-and-such when they have no way to know if that’s the case, especially when Double Fine has deliberately stated it won’t.be the case. Yes, maybe they won’t get it in. That’s a big difference from “will not”.

I guess it comes down to if you’re really that worried about not getting all those precious extra frames you so richly deserve, don’t preorder it and you can just pay your frame premium once it’s out if it’s confirmed it’s unlocked?

He nailed it. Brutal Legend is 4 years of unique, non-mass-market-friendly, labour-of-love developed shovelware. No wonder Double Fine was having so much trouble sales-wise, when they can’t even do shovelware right!

Can I just get something off my chest while we’re discussing DoubleFine? I played “Middle Manager of Justice” and it’s just unbelievably fucking terrible on every level. Just the most lazy, perfunctory, meaningless gameplay yoked on to a freemium model that’s insulting in its pointlessness.

Yeeeeessss seriously thought this would never make it to PC just because it’s no doubt been a licensing nightmare to make happen. Great timing too as I just started replying it on Xbox quite recently, but mainly I’m excited to finally be able to give the multiplayer a try now without having to pay Microsoft for the privilege to do so. Hopefully I’ll even get a chance to play against Tim this Rocktober!